3.11 Running External Commands

Certain GNUtar operations imply running external commands that you
supply on the command line. One of such operations is checkpointing,
described above (see checkpoint exec). Another example of this
feature is the `-I' option, which allows you to supply the
program to use for compressing or decompressing the archive
(see use-compress-program).

Whenever such operation is requested, tar first splits the
supplied command into words much like the shell does. It then treats
the first word as the name of the program or the shell script to execute
and the rest of words as its command line arguments. The program,
unless given as an absolute file name, is searched in the shell's
PATH.

Any additional information is normally supplied to external commands
in environment variables, specific to each particular operation. For
example, the `--checkpoint-action=exec' option, defines the
TAR_ARCHIVE variable to the name of the archive being worked
upon. You can, should the need be, use these variables in the
command line of the external command. For example: